Essential Habits You Can Use Everyday

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1:52Hi there, you're listening to the High Performance Podcast, and this is one of our regular Friday shows. It's a bit shorter where we delve into a specific topic. And today, we want to talk to you about the importance of habits, the essential habits that you can use every day that we believe are going to change things for you. I want to start with a quote. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. So that's Aristotle. And over 2 ,000 years ago, he said that. Yet all these years later, science is finally catching up. Because late last year, researchers from Duke and Stanford found that 43 % of our daily actions are driven by habit, not by conscious decisions.

2:32That means that almost half of your day you're operating on autopilot. So maybe you're listening to this conversation while you're driving or while you're walking the dog or while you're out for a run. Are you thinking about moving your feet if you're running? Are you thinking about walking while you're walking the dog? Are you thinking about how you're driving while you're driving? Of course not. All of those things are happening on autopilot. So the question when it comes to habits is, where is that autopilot taking you? I remind you again, 43 % of your daily actions are driven by habit, not by conscious decisions.

3:02So those autopilot moments are so important. And I think today's show is actually going to help you to take back control because we want to show you that the world's top performers from athletes to entrepreneurs to artists and leaders, well, they build winning habits that stick. So therefore they spend almost half their day with those habits that really make a difference. Because once you master the small things, you can unlock those big changes. So look, if you're ready to really rewire your routines to sharpen your focus, to design a life of purpose and power, I think you're in the right place.

3:33And Damien, of course, is always with me. Damien, I think in some ways when I talk about rewiring routines, sharpening focus, designing a life of purpose, it can feel a bit over the top. And if I was listening to this, I might think, well, habits can do all of that. But the truth is that those stats and the conversations we've had on our show back up that claim. Well, you're absolutely right, Jake. I mean, we can draw a straight line from that Aristotle quote from 2 ,000 years ago to the 400 hours of interviews that we've had over the last five years with some of the greatest minds on the planet today.

4:04And these people have spoken about how they position themselves by using habits to free them up to go out and deliver to the best of their abilities. And what we've done is created a new slot on high performance where we're going to look at how we translate the abstract idea of having a habit into the essential habits and the teachable moments that anybody can use within their own life, whether it's a parent, whether it's as a partner, or whether it's as a professional. I think it's brilliant. Well, let's get into one of our former guests then and start talking about why habits matter and how we can all start employing habits today that make a big difference.

4:38What should we go with first? Well, let's go with one of the inspirations for this new series, Sam Tompkins, the rugby league man of steel, who, when we sat down with him, gave us a legendary quote that regular listeners will have heard us use before. But it's always worth re-listening to again. It's the 1%, things that other people won't notice, do them best. So we, in rugby terms, there'd be people score amazing tries and come up with big tackles. But there's a hundred things that the average spectator wouldn't see. Someone working, when the ball's away, working an extra three metres to cover a little bit of space in case the ball comes back.

5:20These are what we call 1 % efforts. And it was the tiny little details. Sean Wayne says it all the time, anything you do is everything you do. And getting all those little things right makes it easy to score the fancy tries and come up with the big tackles and get wins because you've got that foundation of all these tiny little pieces together. if you haven't got all them together you've got no stability in the group and everybody's trying to score tries and come up with big plays but it can't be done So there you go Sam Tompkins there talking about the power of the 1 % Well let's give people some tangible ways then Damien of bringing those 1 % into their life I'm going to start with the idea of journaling as you know I love to journal at the end of every day I ask has the last 24 hours been 24 hours well spent because I'm never going to get it back but I think one of the things that we can do when it comes to these 1 % is journal how making a small change lifted everything else.

6:15You remember like James Clear referred to them as ripple effect habits. So you can journal like how having a proper breakfast allowed you to stay sharp in your nine o 'clock meeting. You can journal about how getting up at 6.30 gave you an extra half an hour of clarity before the rest of the house woke up or how keeping your kitchen really tidy the night before meant you walked downstairs into a lovely clean and tidy house and you felt that you could start the day fresh in a really good way. That's the first thing I'd like to share with people because I think that proof builds belief and belief builds habits.

6:45So start journaling those small, little, tiny things you do well that lift up everything else. What about you, Damo? I love that. And I'd go back into that Sam Tompkins clip where we also spoke about that lovely line of how you do anything is how you do everything. Journaling, your example there, is a great example of it. But there's almost like minuscule ways, like micro habits that people can get. Think, for example, about when you fold your clothes up. Are you the sort of person that pays attention to folding them up so that next time you get them out of the cupboard, the clothes are neat and tidy?

7:18Because that sort of sets an identity for who you are. Or it might be about, do you keep loads of tabs open on your computer? Or do you just focus on one at a time? Are you the sort of person that brings clarity to whatever task that you're doing? I'd encourage people to think about those micro habits that give you a clue as to your wider identity. That's what Sam spoke about, but I think we can all do that. I remember one of my favourite episodes was a conversation with Will Godara, who spoke around being intentional about what you do, paying attention to the small things, whether it's where you lay the knives and forks on the table or whether you pick up on a conversation from somebody that recounts have not had a New York hot dog in their five-day stay on Manhattan.

8:00and responding to that in the moment, it's all the clue to your wider identity. Are you somebody that cares about the small things? Because ultimately, as we know, they ultimately add up to the big things. You're so right. Because if you pay attention to those small things, then you are the kind of person who brings care to every detail. And if you're caring about every detail, then things just have a habit of taking care of themselves. One final point I'd like to make is this idea of creating a kind of little check-in with yourself. So before you do a task, especially one that you might be tempted to half-ass or not quite do properly.

8:34Just ask yourself a few questions. If how I do this is how I do everything, what would my life look like? At the end of a task, ask yourself a simple question, am I proud of that effort? And probably the most important question of all, what is the cost of being lazy in this moment? I think those questions slow you down just long enough to make sure that you choose integrity over convenience. Because we know, Damien, from the conversations we've had on this show, that excellence is not talent, right? It's tone. If you set it once, it echoes everywhere again and again. What a lovely idea. Thanks, mate.

9:08Can I now choose a clip? Yeah, go on. Okay, I mentioned him already because he had such an impact on my life when he joined us. James Clear. This is a brilliant clip from him. There's that quote from Ed Lattimore where he says the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door. And, you know, there are a lot of things in life that are like that. and encouraging yourself to find ways to make it easy to show up, to make it easy to open the front door, to make it easy to get started. That's where the battle always begins. And you can really get in your head about trying to theorize or come up with the best plan.

9:42I mean, we all do this. We wanna come up with the best sales strategy or the perfect diet plan, the ideal business strategy. But we often do that because we tell ourselves like, oh, I need to learn more before I can take action. But the truth is, the best way to learn is often by taking action. I think it's really powerful, that clip, Damien. But I think one of the challenges is that it still leaves us thinking, well, I still might hit the snooze alarm. I still might not bother going to the gym. So how do we take some advice from James Clear, which is that the heaviest weight in the gym is the front door, and put it into our own lives?

10:20Well, the answer is we have to create a habit around going to the gym or around doing the thing that we don't want to do. So I'll tell you a habit that I find is really valuable for me is to make something social. So like everyone, there's always the voice in the back of my head saying, it's so much nicer to sit on the sofa, Jake, and watch a bit of telly than it is to go to the gym. So what I do is I make it social. So I have a few friends that I ring up and I say, do you want to go to the gym together? Because once you know that you're going to the gym with your mate at nine o 'clock in the morning.

10:50You go to the gym at nine o 'clock in the morning because you're meeting someone. And of course, when you're there, you've also got that person watching what you're doing or you're watching what they're doing. And I think you just lift each other up. So my first bit of advice I'd give for people making a habit around doing things that it's easy to avoid is find a way to make it social because then you commit to it. I think that's brilliant. What a lovely idea. So I love the idea of building on that and doing habit stacking. so you have one idea that is immediately followed by another so a really simple example like if you want to go running in the morning put your running shoes by the side of your bed the decision is already made that you get your feet out of the bed you put them on the floor and you immediately then just put your trainers on that starts the next process of getting the rest of your running kit on that gets you out of the door it reminds me of like one of my heroes is a an old boxing coach called Custamato and on his gravestone he's got this lovely quote that sums up what James spoke about and the wider conversation we have in here Jake he says a boy comes to me with a spark of interest I feed the spark and it becomes a flame I feed the flame and it becomes a fire I feed the fire and it becomes a roaring blaze and that's how I think about habit stacking it's almost that idea of you have to find the spark that you can feed it so just adding in something that gives you the next step that builds momentum that starts the process is a really simple idea that any of us can adopt in our own life.

12:15And can I just say that what we're not doing here is telling you that you have to do really hard things really often to a really high level, okay? The hard things shape people, but not because they finish them, but because they start them, because they're the kind of person that just has a go. And I think that we do hard things, not because they're easy, but because they reveal the person we are. And when you're able to constantly do things that you don't necessarily want to do, you get this idea that you're the kind of person that can deal with challenge. You can deal with hard times. You can deal with pain.

12:46You can deal with suffering because you don't know when something difficult, genuinely difficult is around the corner. But you do know that if you've regularly put yourself in a place where your habits allow you to do some tricky things, then you know that you're going to be able to deal with those tough things. And I think it's just a really good confidence builder to do these things that are sometimes tricky. And again, the truth is that those habits that we've mentioned will help you to do those harder things. But what you described with Nerd Jack is I was recently reading a book by a guy I really admire called Steve Magnus.

13:17And he had this great line of like, you want to change the verb into a noun. So you don't want to say that I run, I am a runner, becomes your identity. You know, I occasionally write, no, no, I am a writer. And he says, once we start to do that, once we take these habits and turn the verb of the habit, it starts to become a noun. It becomes the way that we see ourselves. So the point you're making there is that doing hard things eventually starts to add up to your identity. It becomes your character. You are just somebody that deals with hard things because you've got plenty of examples where the verb has been turned into that noun.

13:53So you're going to do a whole series of shows about the importance of habits and the lessons you've learned, Damien. Is there anything else you'd like to share with us or with our audience to get them excited, to get them tuning in, to get them listening? Yeah, well, I love this stuff. I love thinking about the original purpose of what we did with the podcast, Jake, was that strapline of taking the lived experiences of the planet's highest performers so you can translate them into your own life. And this, to me, really speaks to the purpose of what we're trying to do here. So I've loved going back into the 400 and odd episodes and just finding out one simple idea that one of our guests has told us, finding the science that validates it, and then translated it into a really simple, tangible, teachable moment that people can take away and do.

14:39So the first guest on the series that I thought was highly appropriate was the perfumier, Jo Malone. Jo spoke to us around her cancer diagnosis, like a seminal moment in her life, and how it had brought greater clarity to her and allowed her to then focus on what she really did want to do when she recovered from it. Let's just listen to a clip. it's like sand you know when we go through situations in our life from we and when you pick up wet sand and you hold it in your hand and then as life goes on it starts to dry out and then you open your hand and it's gone so what joe spoke about there jake was this idea that she'd built this amazing life for herself she developed this business from quite humble origins She was married to a man she loved, she said.

15:28She had a young son at the time. And then her doctor came along and diagnosed that she only had months left to live. She speaks about the devastating effect of that. And then this internal voice saying, no, no, come on, let's fight back. Let's do something about it. And she describes to us how the recovery eventually happened. But it was what happened afterwards when she said most of the promises she made for herself weren't like sand through her fingers. and how she wanted to incorporate the habit of remembering the key lessons that she could take forward. So she used a really simple acronym that has been validated by a couple of psychologists out in the States.

16:03And the habit that we can all use is to use this four acronym that says when you want to remember a key moment, first of all, focus intently on it. Don't have distractions around you. Then you need to organize it in your head. So you need to think about where this is going to be useful. Then you need to understand why you're doing it. And then finally, you need to relate it to how am I going to do it? So just simply getting into the habit of when something really important happens, focusing, organizing, understanding and relating to it, ensures that it gets stored into your memory bank, the hippocampus region of the brain, that allows you to go back and revisit it whenever you really need to.

16:41I think that's so good, Damien. And I hope for all of you listening to this, you realize that actually life is about what we spoke about at the very start of this episode. it's about understanding that so much of the time you're operating on autopilot. And if you can incorporate amazing habits into those times when you're operating on autopilot, then your life will go much closer to the direction that you want it to go. Damien's brand new series, Talking About Habits, is out right now. So just check it out in the High Performance feed. And every Wednesday, a new episode drops. And you're really passionate about doing this, aren't you, Damien?

17:13I can tell. Yeah, I've really loved it, Jake. It's been a real privilege just to go back and delve into the science of it because we want everybody to be able to take the ideas from our incredible guests and apply them on their own journey to high performance, however they choose to define it. Love it. Mate, thank you so much. And for you listening at home, go and chase those high-performing habits. Remember, you grow by doing the things you'd rather avoid, not the ones you've already mastered. Thanks for listening.

18:08We'll see you next time.

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